A couple of pilots from warring sides crash-land on a rock and must put their differences aside to work together and make it back home. But it turns out that beneath their armour there is… (Transformers -) More Than Meets The Eye!
One of the big comics news stories from last year (which shows you how small the comics world is that something like this counts as “big news”) was that Robert Kirkman’s Skybound had acquired the Transformers and GI Joe licences from IDW and were relaunching them at Image. Void Rivals is the first series in what Kirkman is calling the “Energon Universe”, a shared universe that includes the two toy brands and this, a new original. And is it good? Is it *beep*!
Reuniting with his Oblivion Song (an even worse sci-fi series definitely worth continuing to ignore) artist, Lorenzo de Felici, Kirkman’s Void Rivals is little more than a watered-down Star Wars-esque space opera with a couple of pointless Transformers cameos for the fanboys. I forget the names of the two leads but they’re basically Han and Leia clones, both in character and their dynamic, who whizz bang woohoo their way across the stars dodging space lasers and mean aliens and whatnot. It’s about as compelling as your average Star Wars comic, ie. not very.
The twist reveal at the end of the first issue is kinda corny - the premise has been done many times before - and becomes progressively stupider once you realise they come from a world shaped like a literal ring that is two halves of the same ring!
Even before the Transformers cameos, Kirkman’s hinting hard that this is Transformers-adjacent with the recognisable subtitle and the contrived uniforms the two characters wear that make them look conveniently robot-like. Does that mean you need to read this prior to the first Transformers book, if you’re planning on doing that? *Beep* no! This is completely disposable pap - just jump straight into the Transformers book if that’s your aim; the two cameos in this one are irrelevant.
The “Handroid” was a clever touch, de Felici’s art is decent and he makes the Transformers look cool, and the cameos themselves are actually among the few interesting parts of the story. I feel like Kirkman could write a solid Transformers book, which I’m sure he will in the near future.
Otherwise, Void Rivals is a read you can safely a-void whether or not you’re a Transformers/GI Joe fan. More than meets the eye? Eh, not really. Just another bad Robert Kirkman comic.
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